Introduction
This essay explores the concept of ‘Inner Light’ as it manifests across Yoga, Buddhism, Indigenous plant medicine, quantum physics and Quakerism, using the framework of God in the first, second, and third person. In this framework, God in the first person is the direct, internal, personal experience of the Divine; God in the second person is the Divine as experienced in relationship (e.g., teacher, priest, community or sacrament); and God in the third person is the Divine as experienced in the objective, observable reality as in nature or a “God” that is outside of us. I learned this framework from the Center for World Philosophy and Religion in this article which looks at the “Three Faces of God” in the context of Jewish mysticism.
Clarifying Intentions
What follows are my observations and synthesis of spiritual practices across different spiritual lineages. My own path has led me to become much more familiar with neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga and Buddhism, followed by indigenous plant medicine traditions, and only recently Quakerism. Please forgive any naivete that I may exhibit, having only brushed the surface of some of these deep disciplines and spiritual traditions. My intention is simply to connect the dots to help make sense of my own journey, with the hope that it creates opportunities for greater mutual understanding and respect between different faiths. By examining these five disparate fields and drawing connections, this essay attempts to demonstrate that the direct, internal experience of the Divine may be a universal phenomenon described by neuroscience and religious doctrines from different parts of the world.
Defining Terms
A rudimentary glossary of the terms used throughout this essay:
God in the first person: the direct experience of divinity emanating from within oneself[1]
God in the second person: The divine as experienced in a relationship channeled through an intercessor. This might be the Pastor, the Pope, the Plant Medicine, the Healer, the Guru, or the Community.
God in the third person: The Divine or God as experienced in objective, observable reality such as in nature, a religious text, or a discipline.[2]
The Inner Light: God in the first person emanating from within
The Inward Light: God in the third person looking inwards at the Self
Inner Light Across Traditions
Yoga: Fine-Tuning the Body’s Expression of the Inner Light
Yoga is a God in the first person practice. It offers a process of fine tuning body and breath (that give rise to Inner Light) through technique as preparation for blissful entrance into deep meditation (e.g. the act of listening to a cohered form of Inner Light that could be considered ‘closer’ to God).
Yoga manifests God in the second person via the relationship between Disciple and Guru. The more well-experienced practitioner, or Guru serves as a guide and models the greater Union with the Divine to the less experienced practitioner. The Disciple-Guru relationship is traditionally practiced with implicit value placed on years of experience, creating a permanent differential between Disciple and Guru. In more modern Disciple – Guru relationships we can supersede hierarchical differences to acknowledge that the beginner’s mind of the less experienced can be a source of wisdom just as much as the years of experience of the well-practiced. We find this student-teacher relationship as a fundamental part of Buddhism as well. God in the second person, the Arahant or Lama, functions as an emanation of wisdom with whom the aspirant can train and evolve their own understanding of Dharma (God in all faces). However, while yoga emphasizes body and breath, Buddhism, in contrast, lays out the phenomenological terrain of reality.
Buddhism: Exploring the Properties of the Light
God in the first person as experienced through consciousness, is fundamental to Buddhist teachings. The Foundations of Mindfulness attempt to provide pith instructions for honing attention and awareness in service of compassion and wisdom that lead to the end of suffering. Since attention and awareness are the means by which we listen to the “Inner Light,”we could say that these practices invite us to internalize God in order to navigate reality (God in second and third person) skillfully and in a way that reduces and eventually eliminates suffering through the Eightfold Path. Buddhism and Quakerism emphasize direct, unmediated attention in the inner experience, while indigenous plant medicine cultures create the medium of ceremony and sacrament as a means of more directly accessing the Inner Light.
Indigenous Plant Medicine: Amplifying the Inner Light
In a ceremonial context, the sacramental use of Entheogens found in indigenous cultures is a way of merging God in the second person (holy plant medicine sacrament) in order to have a direct realization of God in the first person. Entheogens are a means of brightening or manifesting the “Inner Light” such that its messages may be experienced with greater salience, often via pure internal experience that is pre-verbal and more primordial. Yagé, similar to Ayahuasca, the sacrament of the Putumayo region’s indigenous people, was referred to as “liquid light” by the shaman that I practiced with in Colombia. These experiences can contextualize our everyday perception of the “Inner Light” and moor us towards greater sensitivity to this source of gnosis.
Quakerism: Communing with the Inward Light
Quakerism, which I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of, appears to be born of the disillusionment of an individual named George Fox, conditioned to believe that God is found in the second person. Fox embarked on an inward Journey to discover a direct relationship with the Divine (God in the first person), which he called the “Inward Light.” His discovery became a religion as he shared his revelations with the community. A new communal template for congregation emerged as Friends gathered to sit in silence, listening for the coherence of Inner Light (that could be called God or Source) to move someone to speak its message. [3]
“Inward Light,”and “Inner Light”are Quaker metaphors for our innate divinity.
“[Quakers believe] there is “that of God in everyone.” In the earliest days of Quakerism, nearly four centuries ago, this was often thought of as an “inward light,” and was specifically associated with Jesus Christ, “the light of the world.” Silent worship came about because George Fox and other early Quakers believed that silence and stillness would enable people to apprehend the presence of the Inward Light, which would show them the unflinching truth about their lives, including what they ought to do to align themselves with God’s will.”
What Do Quakers Mean By The Inner Light? – Beliefs Of The Quakers
The two have slightly different connotations, as “Inner Light” suggests God emanating from within (God in the first person) while “Inward Light” suggests we’re looking with the light of God from outside, shining in (God in the third person). This video helps elucidate why it is important.
This communal practice of seeking internal coherence through inward focused attention finds an intriguing explanation when viewed through the lens of modern quantum physics
Quantum Physics: Defining the Inner Light
From a quantum physics perspective, we might understand “Inner Light” as an emergent property of the nervous system that facilitates a greater connection to the whole of life through an underlying, shared phenomenological experience. Internally, we experience a kind of singularity of biosemiotic communication that emanates from within all beings and thus transcends the individual organism; an entanglement with all life, referred to as Indra’s net in Hindu & Buddhist cosmology and Jijimugé (jap. 事事無礙) in Japanese Buddhism, a phenomenon within that appears simultaneously in awareness everywhere. Eloquently described by Alan Watts like a spider-web with morning dew, each drop reflecting all other drops.
“Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.”
Alan Watts
Listening inwardly, the primary practice of the Quakers and Buddhists, focuses attention on this interdependent phenomenon of the Inward light, from which coherence emerges that can be interpreted linguistically. The linguistic interpretations become the messages from spirit that are shared during the gatherings of Friends, perhaps in a similar way to an icaro that arises from a shaman listening deeply to the spirit moving through the ceremony.
Conclusion
These are my reflections on the notion of the Quaker’s “Inward Light.” I intuitively sense it’s a metaphor for prana (Yoga), citta (Buddhism), the quantum field (Physics), spirit or light (Christianity/Indigenous). Whatever language is used to refer to this field of divine knowledge is particular to the tradition, but I think we will find that the phenomenological experience of it transcends the tradition and its semantic references.
Footnotes
1 God in first person is best defined by this quote from “The Three Faces of God: Ashram, Synagogue, and Academy” from which I learned of this framework:
God flows through you, not by your denial of your unique perspective, or what Carlos Castaneda referred to as your “personal his-story”[22]—but rather by embracing your unique perspective because it is precisely the place in which you, the human being, meet and embrace the divine.
Mark Gafni
2 God in third person is also wonderfully described in the article:
God-in-the-third-person could be the physical sciences, social sciences, systems theory, Buddhist dharma, Jewish law, or metaphysics. Of course, the various sciences—system theories and the like—are unconscious faces of God; they only become conscious faces of God when they recognize not only the surface but also the interior depth or dimension of reality.
Mark Gafni
3 Quaker History: An Introduction – quaker.org
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